A business process is a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome. Business processes are generally identified in terms of their beginning and end points, sub-processes, interfaces, and the organizational units involved. Often a business process tends to cross organizational boundaries. For example, a business process may occur across or between organizational subunits, such as different departments of a business enterprise. Examples of business processes include: developing a new product; ordering goods from a supplier; creating a marketing plan; processing and paying an insurance claim; etc.
Both large and small business enterprises are challenged with managing a wide variety of business processes. Because the success of a business enterprise is often dependent on the efficiency of its business processes, a significant amount of attention is given to improving business processes. In fact, each year, business enterprises spend millions of dollars in consulting fees in efforts to engineer, and/or re-engineer, their critical business processes. Many business enterprises, particularly smaller businesses, regularly perform business processes without formally identifying and managing the processes.
In an attempt to help businesses better manage their business processes, software developers have developed business process software (e.g., SAP Business Workflow, from SAP AG of Walldorf, Germany) to model and manage business processes. One of the goals of business process software is to “push the intelligence of the processors into the machine,” allowing a business to cut processing costs of paper-based processes by using existing information technology infrastructure to create, route, and process work items formerly associated with paper based business processes. For example, using business process software, a business can capture and manage all of the essential data for a particular business process, and thereby improve the means by which they identify and allocate resources for a business process, schedule the sub-processes, or tasks, required to complete a particular business process, and communicate effectively between the role players involved with the process.
Despite the overall advantages that are realized using present business process software, present software solutions do not adequately address several problem areas. For example, one problem with current business process software applications is their inability to meaningfully monitor the overall efficiency level of a business process. For example, current software solutions do not provide the ability to pinpoint problem areas, or bottlenecks, that delay or otherwise negatively impact on the performance of a process.
Another problem with current business processes software is the inability to effectively communicate the overall importance of an individual sub-process, or task, to the processors directly involved in performing that sub-process. For example, it is often difficult for businesses to impart to the individual actors in a business process the urgency or order of importance of one task compared to others from the point of view of the business as a whole. Rather, process actors prioritize tasks chronologically, or according to the whims of their immediate supervisors whose priorities are, by nature of the business environment, rarely well aligned with the ultimate strategy of the business as a whole. Currently, prioritization schemes rely on deadlines or arbitrary prioritization schemes.